


i believe in what i see (and baby we were meant to be)

by inthestarsisyourhome



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Friends to Lovers, M/M, pour one out for internalised homophobia
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-03
Updated: 2021-01-02
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:21:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,673
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28514124
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inthestarsisyourhome/pseuds/inthestarsisyourhome
Summary: Iwaizumi has a small crisis involving Oikawa's stupidly perfect face.Or: it takes Iwaizumi nineteen years to figure his shit out.
Relationships: Hanamaki Takahiro/Matsukawa Issei, Iwaizumi Hajime/Oikawa Tooru, Iwaizumi Hajime/Original Character(s)
Kudos: 9





	i believe in what i see (and baby we were meant to be)

Any resemblance of a normal life for Iwaizumi ends at 7:02am on a Thursday morning. They’re on the sofa and then they’re not, Oikawa shrieking a stack of inventive cusses about Iwaizumi’s manners as one of his knobbly-ass knees land squarely on Iwaizumi’s chest. Iwaizumi swears loudly, because he’s pretty sure he’s about to die from the sheer level of pain ricocheting around his torso; because Oikawa is an _asshole_ ; because quite frankly they’re getting way too old for this shit.

“Not nice, Iwa-chan,” Oikawa complains from somewhere above him, shifting until he’s comfortable, arms folded across his chest like he’s the affronted one, as if he didn’t just vault across the sofa to _bodily tackle_ his friend to the floor.

Iwaizumi groans and makes an aborted attempt at kicking the other guy off, but Oikawa is taller and wilier and also completely insufferable, so he settles for grabbing the brunette by the waist and just shucking him off.

Except.

Except that’s not what happens. Oikawa’s shirt has rucked up enough that Iwaizumi’s hand lands directly on his skin, fingers splayed across his sharp hipbone and this has happened thousands of times before, they've touched skin and bumped shoulders because they've been friends for nearly as long as they've been alive and that's just how they roll, but this time. This time Oikawa makes a strangled noise, colour climbing the long column of his neck and it’s — Iwaizumi startles. His hands drop to his Oikawa's bent knees, the skin around Oikawa's ridiculous beauty mask blooming red. His hair is still pinned back and his eyes are wide, alight with something Iwaizumi has never seen before.

Iwaizumi is dry-mouthed and utterly rooted to the spot — to that expression — and the morbid fascination coiled in his chest is the only explanation he’ll ever give for the way his hands slowly drag up Oikawa’s thighs, the warm slide of his palms unmistakable against Oikawa’s bare skin. This time he can feel the hitch in Oikawa’s breathing, his friend’s muted gasp, and it sends a jagged prickle of heat jack-knifing through him, so completely unexpected that Iwaizumi chokes, his nails catching on Oikawa’s skin. It’s the Rubicon; Oikawa’s eyes widen even further and he all but jumps up, snapping away from Iwaizumi like he’s been burned.

Iwaizumi sits up slowly, his throat jammed with variations of Oikawa’s name and wait, feeling weird and discombobulated and just completely fucking thrown by whatever just happened. “Tooru,” he tries, but it comes out faltering. Confused.

Oikawa looks at him like this is the worst moment of his life, narrow chest heaving. “I have to, I —”

“Wait —”

But Oikawa brushes him off, grabbing his backpack from he’d dumped on the floor last night, haphazardly throwing things into it like he can’t leave fast enough. “I have class. I — it’s going — I have to go.”

“Will you just —” Iwaizumi bites down on the snarl of frustration and panic lancing through him; he knows Oikawa like the back of his damn hand and if Oikawa leaves like this they might never come back from this. “Please.”

Oikawa stares at him from the door, looking about as frightened as Iwaizumi feels. “Don’t wait up,” he says again, and then he’s gone.

“You didn’t even wash your facemask off!” Iwaizumi snaps, apropos to nothing. There’s a brief second in which he entertains running after his friend and dragging him back so that they can hash this out, but he knows that would only make things worse. Oikawa hates feeling pinned, and this is… truthfully, Iwaizumi doesn’t even know how to broach this.

_Hey turns out I like having my hands on you? Hahaha, plot twist?_

“Fuck!” He flops back down against the shitty threadbare carpet, dragging his hands over his face until he sees stars. “Fuck,” he repeats quietly. He gives himself a moment to wait, just in case Oikawa comes barrelling back in, a flurry of apologies, but time stretches on. Their neighbours’ alarm goes off at 7:15 on the dot, like clockwork, and it becomes clearer and clearer that he’s on his own here. The last text message he’d received from Oikawa was yesterday evening, demanding Iwaizumi make breakfast to make up for an atrocious effort at lunch the day before.

The remnants of that poor, misguided attempt at breakfast is still all over the kitchen bench, smatterings of undercooked tofu and overcooked egg: Iwaizumi had intended to clean up after the meal. The rice cooker is still on.

He turns it off and lets himself sag against the bench for a moment, bleary-eyed and bone-fucking-tired. He hesitates for a moment, thumb tapping against the screen of his phone, before finally shooting a message to Matsukawa. Then he brushes his teeth, runs his fingers through his hair and scowls at himself in the mirror before getting the fuck to class.

**\+ + +**

Four hours into his day he’s starting to wonder if he’s completely fucked up.

He’s got his teeth set around his pencil and all he can seem to focus on is the minute shifts he’d see in Oikawa’s expression, as he’d watched his best friend’s expression morph from shock to horror to — to… he can’t put a word to what he’d seen. Nothing fits right, nothing feels right, but fuck if he doesn’t wish he could take Oikawa’s expression in his hands and examine it from every angle, have it come tangible between his fingers. He wants to take it apart until he understands what every fucking millimetre of the other man’s face meant, and then he wants to make it happen again.

“Shit. Shit.” He grinds his forehead into the edge of the desk until entire constellations are springing up in his eyes, and then once more for good measure. The girl beside him is clutching her pen like a murder weapon, not the least bit interested in how his life has become spectacularly undone.

He’s 19 years old. He’s _nineteen years_ old. He’s a little late for a sexuality crisis, isn’t he?

He tries — carefully, _so_ fucking carefully — not to picture what might have happened if Oikawa hadn’t bolted. What could have happened. He determinedly doesn’t imagine touching Oikawa’s face, his hair (he wants to imagine Oikawa’s hair is gross as hell, because he’s petty sometimes and Oikawa’s radio silence is pissing him off right now, but he knows the other man's unbearably soft and easy to get a hand in, easy to pull). He does not think about how effortlessly they could have closed the distance between them.

Six hours into his day he cuts his losses and sends Oikawa one last message, _please don’t shut me out_ , slams his books shut and goes to meet Matsukawa.

He can count on one hand the number of times he’s shared a meal with Matsukawa without Oikawa. It’s such a rare occasion that he’s not terribly surprised to find that Hanamaki has tagged along for the inevitable show, and is now loitering aggressively on the sidewalk outside the ramen shop.

“Yo,” Matsukawa drawls, still sixty-percent eyebrow and hair, ruthlessly casual in old trackpants and what might be Makki's beat-up shirt. He leads them inside and orders for everyone, perfectly at ease in the dimly-lit room and in the wake of Iwaizumi’s obvious midlife crisis. “I take it our inspiring and no-doubt-humble captain won’t be joining us tonight.”

It’s not framed as a question but Iwaizumi shakes his head all the same. He jostles his chopsticks restlessly. He’s never been good at being vulnerable. He feels clumsy and badly exposed, well aware that disaster is written in every tense inch of him. “Have you uh. Have you heard from him?”

“Ah,” Hanamaki sighs, clucking his tongue and draping himself over the chair like it’s personally wronged him. “Trouble in paradise already, Iwaizumi? Young love can be so tumultuous.”

“Oh my god.” Iwaizumi buries his face in his hands, partly to hide the unexpected flush, and partly to stop himself _gouging Hanamaki’s fucking eye out_. “Just. Has he said anything to you.”

“Should he have?” Matsukawa asks, clearly aiming for a supportive voice. He misses by a mile, but manages to hit both obnoxious and condescending along the way. It’s quite the feat, even for him. Iwaizumi gives himself a moment to collect his thoughts, carefully measuring out his next words. He doesn’t even know if this is the right thing to do: Makki and Mattsun are Oikawa’s friends also and he doesn’t want to betray Oikawa’s trust here. But. He feels like he’s about to vibrate out of his skin from stress alone, and if he has to spend one more goddamn minute worrying that he’s completely fucked over his most important and defining friendship he’s going to spontaneously combust, so. “We… it — we —”

“Ah.” It’s said softly. Expectedly, and god knows Iwaizumi doesn't have it in him to examine that right now. Matsukawa’s hand that curls around his shoulder. “It’s gonna be okay.”

The food arrives: the bowls are almost overfilling with warm, steaming broth and on any other evening Iwaizumi’s mouth would be watering. As it stands his stomach is so thickly knotted with anxiety that food doesn’t stand a chance. His phone inbox is still empty.

Hanamaki is devouring his noodles with reckless abandon, like he hasn’t eaten all week. The last time Iwaizumi visited their apartment he had been offered an assortment of stale biscuits and instant mashed potato, so it’s probably not an inaccurate assumption. “Are you freaking out?”

“I don’t know, Makki,” Iwaizumi snaps, the words bursting through his mouth like they’ve been begging to be heard all day, “I’ve spent the past few hours coming to terms with wanting to kiss my best friend, do you think I’m freaking out?”

There’s absolute silence. Iwaizumi gives up on any kind of public decency and lets his face pancake against the table, groaning through his clenched teeth. Heat is crawling up the back of his neck like a vice. He forces himself to exhale, slow and steady, and makes a point of reminding himself that they’re his friends, his _best_ friends: they love him, and they love Oikawa, and nothing that happens in the next five minutes will change that base fact. At worst he’ll be embarrassed, but he knows they’re still going to hang out and eat cheap, questionable food and talk shit about Ushijima until they’re all blue in the face. “Sorry.”

Hanamaki pats his shoulder. Matsukawa uses the opportunity to steal the pink-haired man’s pork. “ _Did_ you kiss him?”

“No.” He exhales again. He pictures it again, his hand sliding along the smooth line of Oikawa’s jaw, Oikawa’s mouth opening above his, again and again. He can feel how hot his face has become, and his fists clench under the table, pressed tightly against his knees. “I date girls. I’ve… I’ve _dated_ girls.” His voice comes out croaky and uneven, and at the moment he doesn’t even know who he’s trying to convince. He’s dated two girls, in point of fact. Does that not mean anything?

Hanamaki shakes his head, clucking his tongue, even as he’s embroiled in a chopstick war with Matsukawa over the last shred of what could be egg. “Biphobic in the year twenty-bi-teen? Can you believe this, Issei?”

It’s been a long day, and so it takes all of Iwaizumi’s admittedly diminishing willpower to dump his cooling ramen over their heads but he’s actually so fucking tired that the drama would be lost, so what’s the point. “What the fuck am I meant to say to him.”

“Well, I guess that depends on what you want to do. Do you have a plan here?”

Iwaizumi picks at his ramen, his insides gone cold. “No. Maybe. I don’t know. I thought we’d just — just talk about it.”

“And then what?” Makki props his head up on his hand. “I gotta ask: where do you see this going? ‘Cause you know what he’s like. He acts all big but… you can’t mess him around with this, Iwaizumi.”

“I know that,” Iwaizumi says shortly, because he’s not a fucking moron. He’s had a guidebook to Oikawa’s insecurities permanently tattooed inside his brain for years. He’s Oikawa’s lodestone, as much as Tooru is his. He knows what messing this up would cost.

“Do you, though?” Matsukawa’s voice has gone serious, his eyes locked onto Iwaizumi’s. “If you decide to pursue this… well, there’s no coming back, is there? You have to be really sure about exactly what you want out of this, otherwise it’s not fair to either of you.”

Iwaizumi bites back the shitty answer on the tip of his tongue because he’s developed just enough emotional maturity to recognise when he’s reverting to being a defensive asshole. “I know,” he says finally. He tries very hard to mean it when he says, “Thanks.”

And if he spends the rest of the dinner ignoring Hanamaki’s pointed looks in favour of stewing in his own anxiety, well, he figures it’s well-earned.

**\+ + +**

By the time he makes it back to the apartment Iwaizumi feels weary beyond measure, like he’s lived a thousand fucking years and each one has been its own special form of hell. The knowledge that his life has taken an abrupt downhill swing has completely scoured out his brain and he feels weirdly bobble-headed: discombobulated.

His phone is blank and the apartment's lights are off, and he’s so unsurprised by these facts that the dull ache in his chest doesn’t even flinch. He lets himself fall into the sofa, pressing his face so tightly into the unrelenting cushions until it physically hurts. The discomfort is grounding, if nothing else.

_You know him best_ , Mattsun had said quietly, later, tucked into the alleyway outside the ramen shop whilst Hanamaki had been trying (failing) to flag the bus. You’ll know what to do. Iwaizumi grasps at this thought like a lifeline: he’s been friends with Oikawa for almost as long as he’s been alive. They’ve made it through every hurdle life has thrown at them and they’ve always come back stronger, better, more in sync than ever before. This is just another hurdle, a temporary obstacle in their otherwise steadfast relationship.

If they could survive nationals, Kyoutani, _calculus_ — surely they can survive this.

He nearly jumps out of his fucking skin when he hears a shuffle of noise to his left, and in fact does jump off the sofa when Oikawa’s voice cuts through the dark. “The electricity is gone.”

“Holy _shit_ ,” Iwaizumi gasps, somewhere up on the corner of the sofa with his goddamn heart wedged in his throat. “Don’t sneak up on me like — what do you mean the electricity is — we paid the bill!”

“It’s the whole building.” A sudden beam of light shoots upward, a pillar of mediocre illumination between Oikawa’s phone and the ceiling. There’s a towel wrapped tightly around Oikawa’s waist, and he looks as exhausted as Iwaizumi feels: his face webbed with shadows and his mouth pinched tight. It occurs to Iwaizumi that they had the exact same shitty day, spent way too far apart.

“Thanks.” Despite his best efforts, Iwaizumi’s knee won’t stop bouncing. He can’t bring himself to meet Oikawa’s eyes — not like this. Not when Oikawa is practically _naked_ and _wet_ and what the _ever living fuck_. Is this what it’s going to be like now? Has some dormant, fatal wire been tripped and what, now he’ll just never be able to cope with his friend being undressed in any capacity? “Do you. Should we — d’you wanna order in?”

Oikawa’s mouth clams shut, like he was about to say something monumentally stupid. He shuffles about, like he’s _nervous_ , and the tension Iwaizumi’s been carting around all day goes batshit. “Actually I… I have a date, actually, so I should get going.”

“ _What_.” It comes out before Iwaizumi can stop it, a horrible fucking snap of a word that still somehow doesn't convey his shock. It’s general knowledge that Oikawa is borderline obnoxious about scoring dates, there’s no way Iwaizumi wouldn’t have known about this one unless — “Since _today_?”

Oikawa huffs, blowing air between his teeth. Iwaizumi stares at him. “Are you… did you seriously organise a date _today_? You just went out and — what the fuck, Shittykawa?”

It’s like something has dislocated inside of him. He can’t reconcile the soft, haunted look on Oikawa’s face only moments ago with this picture now, Oikawa’s jaw gone tense, intractable. The fact that Oikawa’s immediate response isn’t to preen and brag is a testament to how fucked up this situation is.

“Sorry,” he mutters, the ball of shock and anger dissipating almost instantly. Shame prickles at the back of his neck, deep-set in the marrow of his bones. “That’s not — sorry.”

In a normal world, in a normal timeline, Oikawa would laugh it off with some airy, insufferable claim about Iwaizumi being jealous, or how the latter’s Neanderthal ways scares off all of the beautiful women, but the first option hits a little too close to home and the second… well, Iwaizumi’s starting to think his unparalleled ability to ruin serious relationships has a lot more to do with the man standing in front of him than his own shitty understanding of romance.

Instead of either of those, what happens is this: Oikawa drags his hand through his hair and takes a step back, looking for all the world like he’d rather be anywhere else. It sets something inside Iwaizumi on edge. “Okay, well, I’ve got to —”

“Did I imagine it?” It bursts out of him before he can hope to stop it and it’s like someone’s slapped his friend clean across the face, for how red Oikawa’s face turns. “This morning. We.” Which is all he can say, really, because it’s not like anything happened. It’s not like they kissed, or felt each other up, not really, and hell, Iwaizumi’s starting to wonder if maybe he _did_ imagine it. Maybe all of those long nights spent alternating between his textbooks and helping Oikawa with his sets finally caught up to him and now he’s just. Fucking hallucinating gestures and expressions and _moments_ that don’t mean anything. Maybe this is all his fault, and he’s just out here like a loser ascribing meaning to things that don’t exist.

And Oikawa. To his credit, Oikawa holds his gaze steady, even as red blooms across his cheeks like some kind of macabre face paint. “Imagine what, Iwa-chan?” he says, voice horrifically steady, and Iwaizumi feels it cut on some deep, unfamiliar level of him, like there was a part of him shoved so far down that he’s not even been aware of its existence until now.

He wasn’t kidding: he knows Oikawa like the back of his hand, every facial tic and intonation and he knows, knows, Oikawa is lying. Even if he didn’t have an innate understanding of the man in front of him, the fact that Oikawa had literally bolted from their home this morning is pretty fucking telling. Oikawa was scared. He’s still scared.

Iwaizumi is the one to break the stare-off. Hanamaki’s words ring over and over in his head: _Where do you see this going?_ Whatever he’d envisioned, wherever he’d imagined it going, it’s becoming pretty clear that it would be a one-man vessel, and Iwaizumi’s just not cut out for that shit. He’s never been the kind of person to force someone into anything – and he’s not going to shred the most important relationship of his life over something he isn’t yet sure of himself. “Nothing.”

There’s a brief, anticipatory glimmer, almost as if they could find way to come back from this and rewrite the past few minutes, but then Oikawa’s shoulders droop and he looks away, and Iwaizumi accepts it for what it is: defeat. He says, “You better get going, huh? Wouldn’t want to leave your date waiting, that’s lousy.”

Oikawa chews his bottom lip for a moment – a gross habit he’s picked up for the umpteenth time – and grins, one of his patented smirks he usually saves for the camera, or the bevy of girls holding the camera. He wags his finger. “Ah, Iwa-chan, you’d know a lot about lousy dates!”

He doesn’t wait for a response, which to be honest is the smartest thing he’s done all week ‘cause fuck knows Iwaizumi doesn’t have a clue how to answer that. He disappears into his bedroom to get ready, presumably, already humming loudly under his breath – the show tune for a recurring ad about steam mops. The fact that Iwaizumi recognises it straight away is a testament to how much shitty late-night TV they watch.

_Will you still watch TV with me_ , he thinks, and then promptly wants to brain himself on the coffee table for having such melodramatic thoughts. _You sound like Makki, fuck._

He waits until he can hear the door shut behind Oikawa, and the other man’s footsteps being muffled by his poorly-maintained carpet. Seconds turn into minutes turn into one long stretch of Iwaizumi second-guessing all of his life choices. He has a half a mind to leave the apartment first, like some kind of fucking – some kind of fucking revenge, but he’s a little rattled by how that desperate vindictive urge makes him feel, and then even more rattled by the silent fear that Oikawa wouldn’t notice anyway.

Then he strips off and steps into their mangy shower cubicle, letting the water run ice-cold over his hunched shoulders for one long weightless moment after another. He stays in there for as long as he can bear it, feeling like his whole damn world is unravelling around him, until long after he hears the front door close and lock, well after the electricity switches back on in a truly mediocre flash of light.

He waits and waits and waits until he can’t feel anything anymore, not the cold on his back, not the dull ache in his chest, and then he waits some more. 

**Author's Note:**

> did i set this in 2019 just to make that joke? you bet i did. 
> 
> did i write this knowing next to nothing about japan? ...also yes.


End file.
